Susie Bright's Journal

Feelin' It

This is 10-year-old Micheal's audition at Motown.

When he sang, it was the only time he could tell the truth and survive it. His songs always seemed to be about something else.

MJ was not only denied childhood, but his gender feeling, his sexuality— everything real about him had to be refuted.

All that repression ended up hurting a lot of people. The cash registers kept ringing and a family was cannibalized by its patriarch's violence.

I hear it in his gasps and sweet notes and spiraling toes— those leaps of freedom. A gift that reached out for transcendance, left the body behind— and floated right off the pain wall.

Remembering Marilyn Chambers — 1952 - 2009

I totally fell for her.

That grin of hers... Marilyn’s instant expression of earthy satisfaction. It was like a combination of Huck Finn, The Miss America Pageant, and the first great fuck you ever had, all rolled into one. 

One weekend in the summer of 1999, long after you'd think anyone remembered, a package arrived with a hand-printed message scrawled on the envelope. My hands trembled a little. It said, "A letter from your FIRST girlfriend!"

No way. Could it be my junior high school flame? Last time I saw Miss Thing, she was on the back of a bike heading to Sturgis.

No, this package was from a different kind of girlfriend, albeit with a similar radiance— a sex symbol who was an equal trigger for my teenage nostalgia. 

Inside the envelope was a video and comeback announcement from none other than the best-selling actress in the history of porn, Marilyn Chambers. The tape was called Still Insatiable. 

Marilyn may not have been in 9th grade with me, but we were both teenagers at the same time. She became famous in 1972, when I was 14 and she was just five years older.

I wonder how many pop cult devotees have an instant mental image when Marilyn Chamber's name is mentioned. Do you flash on her swinging the trapeze in Behind the Green Door, taking all comers— or are you haunted by her voracious marathon on the pool table in the original Insatiable? Perhaps you have a David-Cronenberg corner of your heart  etched in her memory because her starring role in Rabid. 
  

For most people, even if they never saw a hardcore film in their lives, the Chambers legacy will always conjure the image of a sweet young thing with an adorable smile, cradling her baby on the Ivory Snow detergent box.

She was the girl who went from modeling for soap suds to becoming a porn star legend, cast in one of the first high-production, no-holds-barred X-rated movies. But there was something about her that was bigger, an icon of the 70s, an authentic germination.

Reading the DVD cover letter, I learned that Marilyn decided to make her comeback role by playing a right-wing politician who stumps for anti-porn legislation. She investigates the sordid depths of the sex biz and inevitably succumbs to her libido, thereby…. changing her position. It’s a porn script!

Can’t you just see her starring in the ultimate Sarah Palin rehab farce?

Marilyn certainly grew up from when she was a whippet-slim fox with a boyish figure. In her new movie, she was womanly with breasts and hips— a sweet Momma’s belly. I asked her director and old comrade-in-porn, Jane Hamilton, how fans reacted to her image who'd seen the comeback movie.

Jane said, "About half are irate because they don't ever want to see Marilyn again if she's not exactly as they remember— and the other half wouldn't care WHAT she looked like as long as they know its her— they love her, period."

"I think I'm part of that last crowd," I said. 

What gave me goose bumps in her return to the screen was the moment when her steely blue eyes turned right into the camera, and that smile of hers made everything else in the picture disappear.

When Marilyn made her first film, neither she nor anyone else had any idea she was making history. Her early producers, Jim and Art Mitchell, were bone-grateful to have a radiant young beauty who would go for it. I don't think anyone realized what her star power was all about. That captivating smile of hers personified a whole attitude about taking your pleasure and loving every minute of it.

The other key to Marilyn's appeal, the character behind that great face, is found in the title that most serious sex fans know her by: Insatiable. She could bottom on camera like few others. —So much cinematic power from an ironically-labeled “submissive” position.

Marilyn inhabited an unyielding, butch, yet feminine mojo— where you might imagine taking on the entire Nave SEALS and then taunting them for more.  She made porn clichés like “volcanic” come to life. She was Pelé-esque, but with the endgame of vulnerability and... ecstasy. Her bonhomie about what was possible— it was infectious.

She was so warm, witty, accepting of you as you were. A survivor of crazy times.

She was unique among showbiz people— and I do mean show business— it's hardly just porn— who was equipped to deal with life after one’s heyday. Very few have the security, good health, and family to translate from the A to D list, even if they have the wry humor for it, which Marilyn certainly did. She also had a strong family and great friends.

Getting old: not for the timid, certainly. But for those who spark so bright, the burn might be eviscerating. Marilyn, such an angel; what was all that shine about if not a capacity for love?

Portrait Photo: Life Magazine

Photo still: Rabid

Update: Marilyn died of undiagnosed heart disease, the number one killer of American women in her age group.

The Radiance of Bettie Page, 1923 - 2008

I was first introduced to the radiance of Bettie Page in 1983, by the editors of a gay leathermen's magazine, Drummer.

John Rowberry lent me a VHS bondage tape of Bettie modeling from the 1950's which was so cute—there's no better word to describe it— I played it continuously during Thanksgiving dinner that year. It was the beginning of a devoted affair.

(I first ran this essay in 2006. With the announcement today of Bettie's passing, I'm reprinting it, with all my appreciation.)

Miss Page came a long way in American limelight from the time her pictures were the subject of a full federal obscenity investigation, intent on saving juveniles from the depravity of smut. She became a Christian missionary and no one thought they would ever hear from her again.

But Bettie's story was different from the average Suicide Girl. She was doing fetish photography when the subject was completely removed from any sense of camp or fashion. The closet was shut so tight not even a filament of sex-positivity could be imagined. The damnation she faced must have been entirely without context to comprehend.

 It is this history that's the focus of director/writer Mary Harron's film, The Notorious Bettie Page. Mary was the director of my episode on Six Feet Under last year, and after meeting her, I marveled, "Wow, a feminist is making the Bettie Page biopic, I can't believe it."

I asked her to talk to me more about her adventures with Bettie.

SB: I was first introduced to Bettie in the milieu of gay life, the counter-culture of 1980s San Francisco and New York.

She was the post-AIDS pin-up girl, a ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak period.

At the same time, bondage and fetish were entering mainstream fashion, fueled by gay and punk culture. What do you make of such an unusual rebirth?

 
MH: It's interesting that gay men and young women have been the twin engines of the Bettie cult. I wonder if her original gay cult had something to do with the ironies inherent in her image, as well as her innate fabulousness as an image.

The Bettie bondage shots are filled with contradiction: her sunny smiles and cheesecake poses are at variance with the pictures' supposed message of dark S&M.

She was the first person to do bondage as fashion, because for her it really was all about dressing up. And there is a camp element in the Bettie catalog: the bondage shots next to homely wallpaper and living room furniture in the Klaw pictures, the leopards with leopard-skin bathing suits in the Bunny Yeager shots.

SB: Bettie was the "ne plus ultra" of photogenic. What kind of beauty does the camera love like this? What made Page's image so spectacular?

MH: She knew just how to position her face and body for the camera. More importantly, she was so relaxed.

One of the secrets of being a great photographic model, as it is for a great film actor, is that you let the camera in. It's an intimacy that the model or actor creates with the lens, that then transmits itself to the viewer.

SB: You point a finger, without drawing a thick line, at her history of sexual abuse, incest, — and also, at her survival of a gang rape when she was a teenager, long before her modeling career.

How do you think women recover, sexually, from situations like that?

MH: The abuse by her father was the most damaging, because she was still a child. She was a traumatized person, but she did have an active sex life. Billy Neal, her first husband, told me they had a great sex life and I believe him— it was clearly the motor in their relationship. 

Sexual abuse, or rape, is an awful trauma but it doesn't mean you will never enjoy sex— although it may mean you become more sexually-identified, as the careers of countless porn stars will attest.

Many men who've seen the film complain that Bettie doesn't react much to the sexual abuse: she doesn't show more rage or grief. But most men have no idea how much sexual shit women go through, how many of their female friends, relatives, and co-workers have been raped or abused in some way. They don't know about it because the women don't talk about it, and just get on with their lives, as Bettie did.

 
SB: My interpretation of Page's "naivete," and her various personalities as model, missionary, etc., is that she was coping the best way anyone does when they are suffering from mental demons.

But if she had been homely— and crazy— or even just plain, what would have happened then? Sexual allure is often both the salvation and damnation of people who need to be seen more deeply than the surface....

MH: If she had been homely, her mental problems would have been spotted earlier. The people I talked to who knew her in the Fifties all talked about how sweet, friendly, unassuming she was— but at the same time, no one seemed to know her intimately.

Even her first husband, Billy Neal, found her a mystery. That suggests to me that she had sealed herself off: there was something blank and inaccessible about her. She was always late, often hours late, which implies that she would just space out.

Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible. I think it's significant that Bettie's breakdowns happened in her middle age.

There were a lot of things going wrong for her by then. Her fourth marriage had collapsed, and with it her hopes of happy family life.

There were the demons from the past, her father's abuse and the gang rape. You can't discount the traumatic effects of aging. By now she was a middle-aged woman, and she had spent her whole adult life as a beauty. Her identity, her finances, her social life, her sense of herself: everything depended on that, and it was gone.

Bettie's "naivete" in the film should have quotation marks around it. It was deliberate. She had sealed herself off in some protective way from what disturbed her— not an uncommon mode among 50's women— and lived in her own bubble. She had all the evidence in front of her about what the fetish photographs were for, but she chose not to examine it.

 Thanks to Mary, Joe Westmoreland, John Rowberry, and all my collector friends, for the photos and Bettie memories.

Studs Terkel, May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008

Studs Terkel has taken his last turn at bat.

"Take it easy, but take it..." No one ever said it better.

"Blessed Be The Nation," from Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Paul, I'm Glad You Missed the Bailout, But I Sure Miss You

“If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.”

Film clip from Cool Hand Luke, when Luke Jackson sings "Plastic Jesus" upon receiving the news of his mother's death.

Spend Your Last 9 Months Floating— Finish Off as an Orgasm!

I found out from Paul Krassner that George Carlin's daughter, Kelly, quoted my obit during her family memorial.

I'm so touched! It's just not the same without him around.

Carlin had the most perfect last words on dying:

"The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus?

"I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating......and you finish off as an orgasm."

On my audio show this week, I reminisce about Carlin, and then— on another subject!—  talk about the past and current state of "inter-racial" porn, which is like The Theater of the Absurd, antebellum-style:

Listen to an excerpt

Listen to the whole show

$2 a show, for a year; why not? LINK
 

To my amazement, John McCain has decided to make his entire TV campaign about stimulating the imaginary, yet titillating "horror" of Obama sullying the specter of white, and particularly, blond, womanhood. Any one of his ads that juxtapose Barack with Paris or Britney feel like they came right out of a peep show arcade. It's out of the Karl Rove playbook, to be sure. This is the guy whose entire "oeuvre" consists of perverse race and sex baiting. Focus on the other guy's cock, and your election is in the bag. I can't wait 'til he dies, and the "Rovian Porn Archives" are revealed. I'm sure his rivals the Vatican's.

Finally, in my Try This at Home" mailbag, I get a letter from a listener who asks, "Hospital Sex. Am I crazy, or does it really happen? Is it weird to be horny while recuperating from surgery?"

Darling, it's the most natural thing in the world...

Don't forget, you can send your confidential questions and feedback about the show to susie@audible.com. (Episode 352, Aug. 8, 2008)

Photo Credit: Laurel & Hardy in The Battle of the Century, 1927. Over 4000 real pies were employed in the climactic battle of the custards.

Susie and Kate Bornstein Break a Few Gender Plates

 Susie Bright Interviews Transgender Outlaw Kate Bornstein

Download this free sample of In Bed with Susie Bright!

Here's the iTunes link.

When it comes to turning boys and girls upside down, and shaking up every orgasmic assumption you ever had, no one does it better than transgender author, playwright, and performance artist Kate Bornstein.

Susie and Kate discuss Bornstein's latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws, as well as gender hierarchy and depression. 

If you've ever wanted to hear the un-cutesy truth about how people stay alive when all seems lost, this is it.

If you like this sample and want to hear more, you can subscribe (for $2 a show) to my weekly show at Audible.com. I'm offering a 12-episode season on iTunes to give new listeners a taste!

Photo Credit: Poster by Kath Moonan and Alexandra Lazar  from the International Festival of Transgender Arts.

Carlin Crosses Out

 Georgie, we hardly knew ye.

Yes, you were a prophet, our long-haired bard, our poet with an out-fucking-standing command of the English language. A rare bird.

The Times is calling him "irreverent," today, in their obit headline, which is patronizing. If we're going to call him a "rev" anything, it would be a revolutionary.

Carlin, born in 1937, was prescient. What he said forty years ago about the War Machine, the crucifixion of the First Amendment, the abuses of the Church, industrial pollution, the corporate indifference to... well, everything—  his speeches could have been written yesterday.

His most radical satire, his decision to take off the suit, grow out his beard, and damn the establishment torpedoes, was his enduring contribution to American democracy.

I've been looking at a lot of my "Carlin Archives" this morning, grieving him, and thinking how influential he's been on my thinking since I first heard him, when I was in 7th grade.

I remember playing "Class Clown" for my mother— a woman whose first twenty years were entirely dominated by the Irish Catholic Church— and it was a comic exorcism for her. She peed in her pants! She was cured in one LP!

Carlin had a real gift for telling the story of his life, and in later years, I enjoyed listening to his reminiscences at the Actors' Studio.

Last year, he ripped at a gigantic Narcotics Anonymous meeting, where he described turning seventy-years-old as "69, with one finger up your ass." He eloquently described the virtues of being an "old fuck," and what it's like to go through your address book, "crossing out the dead people."

This November, he was due to accept the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for Humor, which truly puts him next to his peer— someone who could bullseye hypocrisy when he saw it, and leave us in hysterics at our own death wish.

Carlin would say, "Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town."

And Twain might've replied with his own: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."





Photo Credit: L.A. Times. Carlin was arrested on July 21, 1972, at Milwaukee's Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws, after performing "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television."

Deborah Jeane Palfrey Checks Out

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the "DC Madam" whose call-girl service got busted in the cross-hairs of partisan payback, has committed suicide. She hanged herself at her mother's home in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Susie's  talk with Jeane, 2007: Link

Transcript of DJP interview: Link

 

 

Jeane, I am so sorry. I know you swore to me that you'd never serve another term in prison for prostitution, or anything else. You almost lost your eyesight the first time. I'm sure you asked your lawyers if there was any hope for your sentencing, and I guess it must have looked bleak.

I know how pissed you were. This was an act of revenge, and I know who you're determined to haunt.

You were righteously furious at all the men who "walked away." 

I'm sure that goes quite a ways back, but it certainly includes the esteemed gents on your client list: Louisiana fundamentalist, Senator David Vitter; Abstinence Ambassador Randall Tobias, who squashed AIDS funds all over the world; "Shock and Awe" war profiteer, Harlan Ullman.

And that was just the expendable layer. None of them were charged with anything; all are living quite comfortably, in particular because they have no conscience whatsoever.

Was Jeane suicidal, in the first place? Yes, but I'd describe that carefully. She wasn't irrational to think she wouldn't survive another round in a penitentiary; her health was poor. And she was brittle, the kind of person who is aware of her considerable intellect and education, but who finds herself in unlucky and vulnerable situations over and over again.

She was gullible to the wrong kinda guys, the kind of men who turned her out when she was young, whom she mistakenly placed faith in when she was looking for love, or a safe harbor. She's the kind of woman who should've been groomed for university when she was young, and cultivated for her bright mind and sensitivities. Instead, she was exploited and wasted— and her bitterness, her depression, was a result of that cruel awareness.

She tried to "go straight" after the first round in prison, and of course, was undermined by the typical prejudices against her record. She became more angry about the hypocrites, and determined to beat them at their own game. But it's clear that when Cheney bigwigs were on her tail, she wasn't going to beat their surveillance and manipulations.

Why doesn't everyone kill themselves when they're facing hard odds like Jeane did? Well, that's the million-karma question. All I can offer at this point, is painfully prescient rhetoric: Hell hath no fury like a smart woman scorned.... and justice has NOT been served.

Albert Hofmann Takes His Last Trip

With "no sense of urgency," Albert Hofmann died today at the age of 102. He invented LSD in 1938, and took the first trip— in his case on a bicycle and 250 micrograms— in 1943.

Truly a legend of "better living through chemistry," Hoffman was an imaginative and inspiring leader in the psychedelic community throughout his old age. I remember being lime-green with envy at my friends who traveled to Basel to help celebrate his 100th birthday.

Let's shout the obvious: the benefits and insights of LSD-25 have been thwarted and crucified by the Titanic stupidity of the War on Drugs™ — one of the great brainwashings of our time.

If you have ever experienced a psychedelic, either synthetic or right out of your garden, I hope you'll mention it in the coming days, to someone you love who might not be in the loop. Get out that Mom Took Acid button and stick it on your fridge. Smell the Marigolds. Raise a glass to Albert!

The Yippies, circa 1968, were notorious for suggesting that we put "acid in the water supply" to speed an end to the Vietnam war. Below, proof they were right...